Torabi et al.

European Transport Research Review (2020) 12:2 European Transport

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12544-019-0393-1
Research Review

ORIGINAL PAPER Open Access

Energy minimization for an electric bus

using a genetic algorithm
Sina Torabi* , Mauro Bellone and Mattias Wahde

Abstract
Background and methods: This paper addresses, in simulation, energy minimization of an autonomous electric
minibus operating in an urban environment. Two different case studies have been considered, each involving a
total of 10 different 2?km bus routes and two different average speeds. In the proposed method, the minibus
follows an optimized speed profile, generated using a genetic algorithm.
Results: In the first case study the vehicle was able to reduce its energy consumption by around 7 to 12% relative
to a baseline case in which it maintains a constant speed between stops, with short acceleration and deceleration
phases. In the second case study, involving mass variation (passengers entering and alighting) it was demonstrated
that the number of round trips that can be completed on a single battery charge is increased by around 10% using
the proposed method.
Keywords: Energy minimization, Autonomous vehicles, Electric minibuses, Speed profile optimization, Genetic
algorithms

1 Introduction frequent and time-consuming recharging cycles. Indeed,

In recent years, to meet the high demands of reducing
greenhouse gas emissions in transportation, the public
transportation sector has started to include more electric
vehicles (such as city buses) in their fleets. In addition to
providing lower emission and environmental pollution
compared to vehicles equipped with internal combustion
engines, electric vehicles offer more high-level control
opportunities to increase their energy efficiency and
longevity.
This study has been carried out in the framework of
the Sohjoa Baltic project,1 which involves pilot studies in
several cities of the Baltic sea region, namely Kongsberg,
Helsinki, Tallinn, Gdansk, and Vejle. The project aims at
improving the first-last mile part of public transportation
to provide a ubiquitous and efficient service by using au-
tonomous electric minibuses. The initial study within
this project has identified several gaps to be overcome,
see Ainsalu et al. [1], one of which is the fact that energy
efficiency in electric buses must be improved for them
to provide a stable service as current vehicles require
1
see www.sohjoabaltic.eu
* Correspondence: sina.torabi@chalmers.se
Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden
the current technology typically requires vehicles to stop
for between 6 and 8 h to recharge. Thus, extending the
range of such vehicles (on a single battery charge) is a
highly relevant issue.
This paper is focused on energy optimization for an
autonomous urban electric bus with regenerative brak-
ing, operating under a drive cycle involving frequent
stops with short distance between. The method used
here is based on the speed profile optimization (SPO)
framework introduced and successfully applied in earlier
work; see Torabi and Wahde [2]. The main contribution
of this paper is an extension of that method to the case
of urban electric minibuses with regenerative braking.
This paper is organized as follows: Sect. 2 provides a
brief overview of related work. The vehicle model, and
the concepts of road and speed profiles are described in
Sect. 3, along with implementation details. In Sect. 4, the
procedure used for evaluating the speed profiles and the
optimization of the speed profiles are presented along
with a description of the baseline case against which the
optimized speed profiles are compared. The road profile
used in the simulations is introduced in Sect. 5. The re-
sults are presented in Sect. 6 and are discussed in Sect.
7. Finally, the conclusions are presented in Sect. 8.

© The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
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Torabi et al. European Transport Research Review (2020) 12:2
2 Related work
Current work on reducing energy consumption of vehi-
cles and improving their energy efficiency can be divided
into three general categories, namely improving drive-
train design, developing new drivetrain systems (such as
in hybrid and fully electric engines), and optimizing the
utilization of existing vehicle technologies such as, but
not limited to, energy-efficient driving (or eco-driving)
that can be achieved by following an optimized speed
profile.
For heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs) with combustion en-
gines, there has been much work on reducing fuel con-
sumption (see e.g. Henzler et al. [3], Hellström et al. [4],
and Torabi and Wahde [2]) something that involves gen-
erating energy efficient speed profiles, i.e. the speed of
the vehicle as a function of its position along the road.
These strategies result in fuel savings from 3% to 12%
on average (relative to the case where the vehicle drives
using standard cruise control). On the other hand, for
hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) energy optimization
strategies typically involve efficient management of the
energy flow between the batteries and the fuel sources
(see e.g. Wirasingha et al. [5], Moura et al. [6], and He
et al. [7]), velocity trajectory optimization (see e.g. Gue
et al. [8] and Mensing et al. [9]) and battery charge sus-
taining strategies (see e.g. Mets et al. [10] and Bashash
et al. [11]). For fully electric vehicles, however, only few
methods have been proposed for generating optimized
speed (or torque) profiles (see e.g. Dib et al. [12], Roh-
kämper et al. [13], and Jiang et al. [14]) similar to those
optimized for vehicles equipped with internal combus-
tion engines.
The problem of energy-efficient driving is commonly ad-
dressed using optimal control. With this formulation, the
problem of finding an optimized speed profile for a given
road is often solved numerically using dynamic program-
ming (DP) both for vehicles with combustion engines, see
e.g. Henzler et al. [3], and for hybrid and fully electric vehi-
cles, see e.g. Mensing et al. [9], Guo et al. [8], and Dib et al.
[12]. Speed trajectory optimization for HEVs has been car-
ried out in various ways. For example, in Mensing et al. [9],
the optimized velocity is found by solving a single-objective
optimization problem in which the cost function is a
weighted sum of the fuel consumption and the battery
state-of-charge (SOC). Their approach was compared to
real-life drive cycles for a specific route with various weight
settings (in the objective function) during optimization,
resulting in fuel savings of 10% with similar battery dis-
charge over the considered cases. In Gue et al. [8], an en-
ergy management strategy for an HEV using a bi-level
model predictive control (MPC) is proposed, where the
torque split ratio, gear shift schedule, and the velocity tra-
jectory is optimized for a given road. The proposed bi-level
MPC improves the computational efficiency of the
Page 2 of 8
common DP-based methods while resulting in similarly
energy-efficient speed trajectories. This is achieved by first
generating an optimized speed trajectory in an outer loop
and then determining the optimal torque and gear schedul-
ing in an inner loop so that the vehicle can track the speed
trajectory as closely as possible.
Similar DP-based speed trajectory optimization ap-
proaches have been introduced for fully electric vehi-
cles as well; see e.g. Dib et al. [12], Jiang et al. [14],
Maamria et al. [15], and Rios-Torres et al. [16].
Energy-efficient driving strategies developed for fully
electric vehicles and HEVs are typically considered as
driving assistance systems that provide reference
speed recommendations for a human driver to follow.
The energy savings obtained using these strategies (i.e.
when the driver follows the recommended speed tra-
jectory) are often in the range of 9% to 14% relative to
the case in which a human driver controls the vehicle’s
motion during the drive cycle without any recommen-
dations. Even though the reported energy savings are
high in DP-based methods, they are not directly com-
parable to the autonomous urban bus driving case
considered here, since they involve a human driver for
defining the baseline case, and it is unclear how that
person drove in the absence of recommendations (for
their baseline case). Moreover, DP-based methods suf-
fer from the curse of dimensionality and are thus com-
putationally heavy. Additionally, in order to use DP
algorithms, one should discretize the problem so as to
ensure that the optimization problem is solvable in a
reasonable time. Therefore, DP-based methods are
often used with large discretization steps and short
optimization horizon which decreases the perform-
ance of the obtained solutions.
An alternative approach is to solve the optimization
problem using stochastic optimization methods such as
genetic algorithms. In Torabi and Wahde [2] for ex-
ample, the fuel savings obtained by their speed profile
optimization (SPO) method using genetic algorithms
compares favorably to those obtained by methods based
on dynamic programming for HDVs equipped with in-
ternal combustion engines. Moreover, the SPO frame-
work can be used without discretization of the problem
while also providing longer optimization horizon.
3 Model and representation
This section starts with a description of the electric ve-
hicle model used to calculate the energy consumption of
an electric vehicle and its battery state-of-charge. Next,
the road and speed profiles are introduced.
3.1 Vehicle model
The longitudinal vehicle model used here is implemented
based on a computationally efficient energy consumption
Torabi et al. European Transport Research Review (2020) 12:2
model proposed in Genikomsakis and Mitrentsis [17]. This
model, in addition to transforming the traction power re-
quirement at the wheels into battery power requirements
using a generic physics-based vehicle model, provides an
estimation of the battery’s state-of-charge, while also con-
sidering the resistive forces such as aerodynamic drag and
rolling resistance. Moreover, the model considers regenera-
tive braking system into the battery state of charge model.
The energy consumption of the vehicle is calculated by in-
tegrating the following differential equation:
dE=dt ¼ P tot
where E is the energy consumption and Ptot is the total
power provided by the battery which is computed as
Ptot ¼ Pb ηRTE ;
Pb ¼ P m þ Paux :
Here, Pb denotes the battery’s output power. Pm repre-
sents the required power by the electric motor whereas
Paux is the auxiliary power, i.e. the power needed to op-
erate the vehicle’s auxiliary systems (a value that is con-
stant throughout the simulation). Moreover, ηRTE
(slightly smaller than 1) represents the battery’s round
trip efficiency, the precise value of which depends on
whether the battery is in charging or discharging mode;
see Eq. (6) below. The battery’s state-of-charge (S) is up-
dated as follows:
dS=dt ¼ −P b =C;
where C denotes the battery’s capacity (in Ws). Finally,
the electric motor’s required power is calculated by con-
sidering the longitudinal dynamics of the vehicle and its
engine efficiency:


Pt ¼ v  mð1 þ C i Þa þ F aero þ F g þ F roll
 This section first describes the procedure for evaluating a
P t ηr ; if P t < 0
Pm ¼
Pt =ηt ; if Pt > 0
where Pt is the traction power required from the electric
motor, v denotes the vehicle’s speed, m is the mass, Ci is
the correction factor for the rotational inertia force, and
a is the vehicle’s acceleration. The terms Faero, Fg and
Froll represent the aerodynamic force, gravity force, and
the rolling resistance force acting on the vehicle, respect-
ively. Finally, ηr and ηt are the electric motor’s efficiency
in regenerative (charging) mode and in traction (dischar-
ging) mode, respectively. For a full description of the
model and its parameter values, see Genikomsakis and
Mitrentsis [17].
Page 3 of 8
3.2 Road profile
In order to evaluate speed profiles in the simulation,
a road profile is needed that represents the elevation
as a function of longitudinal distance along the road.
The road profiles have been defined using composite
Bézier curves, i.e. a sequence of Bézier splines, as in
Torabi and Wahde [2]. Since only the longitudinal
motion is considered, a road profile can be modelled
using two-dimensional composite Bézier curves where
the two dimensions are the longitudinal position and
elevation along the road. Thus, the road profiles are
ð1Þ represented in the following form:
ðs; zÞ ≡ ðsi ðuÞ; zi ðuÞÞ ¼ P 0 ð1−uÞ3 þ 3P 1 uð1−uÞ2
þ3P 2 u2 ð1−uÞ þ P 3 u3 : i ¼ 0; …; n−1 (7)
ð2Þ where the vectors Pi are two-dimensional control points,
u is a parameter ranging from 0 to 1, and n is the total
ð3Þ number of splines. With this representation, at any given
point s along the road, the corresponding spline index
and the u-value can be determined. Therefore, the eleva-
tion can be written as z = z(s).
3.3 Speed profile
A speed profile is represented using two-dimensional
composite Bézier curves, similar to the road profile rep-
resentation defined in Eq. (7) above, where the two di-
mensions are the longitudinal position and the
longitudinal speed of the vehicle. An example is given in
Fig. 1, in which the stops can be clearly seen. The speed
profile provides a desired speed at any given position
ð4Þ along the road, for the vehicle to follow using a PID con-
troller. Note that, when the vehicle is at a stop, and is
about to leave, the desired speed is artificially inflated to
a small positive value, in order to start the motion. Once
the vehicle’s speed is positive, it then follows the speed
profile.
ð5Þ 4 Methods
given speed profile. Next, the speed profile optimization
ð6Þ
method is described, and then the baseline method against
which the speed profile optimization results are compared.
4.1 Evaluation of a speed profile
Assuming that a speed profile is available, the energy
consumption of a vehicle can be measured by simulating
the motion of the vehicle as it follows the speed profile.
A simulation environment was written (in C#. NET)
implementing the vehicle model described in Sect. 3.1
and the road and speed profiles defined in Sects. 3.2 and
3.3. To evaluate a speed profile performance in terms of
energy consumption over a given road profile, the fol-
lowing procedure is used: At each time step, the current
Torabi et al. European Transport Research Review (2020) 12:2 Page 4 of 8

Fig. 1 Top panel: A 2 km road profile with slope variations within ±1%. The boxes represent the bus stops along the route with the final stop at
the travelled distance of 2 km. The figure shows the complete profile for an entire drive cycle, from start to end, and back again. Bottom panel: A
corresponding optimized speed profile, for a case with an average speed between stops of 10 km/h; see Sect. 6.1

longitudinal location of the vehicle along the road is de-
termined, and it is then used to obtain the desired speed
(at the same location) from the speed profile. Thus, the
speed profile acts as a lookup table. The desired speed is
then fed to the PID controller as its set speed. Note that
the set speed varies over a road profile. Therefore, due
to the controller’s non-zero response time, the vehicle
will not follow the set speed exactly, and neither is it re-
quired to do so in the method presented here. The pro-
cedure is repeated, time step by time step, until the
vehicle reaches the end of the road profile.
In this work, it is assumed that the motion of the ve-
hicle takes place in a dedicated lane so that it is able to
follow its speed profile. It is further assumed that there
are no traffic lights along the bus routes. However, if
traffic lights were present, they could be dealt with as
additional stops; see Sect. 7 for detailed discussion.
4.2 Speed profile optimization
The speed profile optimization is carried out with respect
to energy consumption only, using a genetic algorithm
(GA). A speed profile must fulfil certain constraints,
namely (i) the instantaneous maximum speed must not
exceed an upper limit (the speed limit), (ii) the average
speed should not be below a certain user-defined thresh-
old, and (iii) the final battery state of charge (for the elec-
tric vehicle) should be above a threshold to prevent
battery damage.
As in any standard GA, the algorithm maintains a
population of M individuals (here 20), each defining a
speed profile. The speed profiles are encoded in chromo-
somes that specify the speed values (i.e. the second di-
mension of the control points in Eq. (7)), with the
requirement of positional continuity (C0) and derivative
continuity (C1), which together ensure that the speed
profile is continuous and smooth after decoding. In
order to meet these two requirements, the following
conditions must hold:
Piþ1;0 ¼ P i;3 f or i ¼ 0; …; n−1; ð8Þ
Piþ1;1 −Piþ1;0 ¼ P i;3 −P i;2 f or i ¼ 0; …; n−1; ð9Þ
where Pi,j is the jth control point of the ith spline. More-
over, the speed at the start and the end of a profile
should be set to 0. The first spline thus requires three
parameters, the following n-2 splines two parameters
each, and the final spline one parameter. Therefore, each
chromosome contains a total of 3 + 2(n-2) + 1 = 2n
parameters.
For a given individual, the decoding procedure results
in a speed profile that is evaluated as described in Sect.
4.1. The evaluation results in a single number, namely
the energy consumption Eend obtained when the vehicle
reaches the end of the profile. If the maximum speed or
the final battery state-of-charge constraints are violated,
the speed profile is assigned zero fitness. If not, the fit-
ness measure f is taken as
8
 2
>
> v km
< 1 e−cv v d −1 ; i f jv−vd j < 2
f ¼ E end h ð10Þ
>
> km
: 0; i f jv−vd j > 2
h
where v is the actual average speed, vd is the desired
average speed (see Sect. 6), and cv is a positive constant.
Selection is carried out using standard tournament
selection with a given tournament size (typically 2–5)
and a tournament probability of pt (around 0.7–0.8).
Single-point crossover with a probability of pcross
Torabi et al. European Transport Research Review (2020) 12:2
(around 0.7–0.9) is used. Once two new individuals
are formed through selection and crossover, mutation
is applied with probability of pmut (around 0.05–0.1)
with either full-range mutation (with probability of
0.5) or creep mutation (with probability of 0.5) with a
creep rate of 10% of the full range. In order to make
sure that the best speed profile found so far is not
lost when forming the next generation (in the GA),
this profile is passed unchanged to the next gener-
ation, a concept known as elitism.
4.3 Baseline method
The baseline case roughly mimics a typical driving se-
quence performed by a bus driver, albeit executed in a
more precise manner (with a PID controller), see e.g.
Pourabdollah et al. [18]. In this case, a speed profile is
defined with constant speed (referred to as the cruising
speed) between stops. The first and last splines of a
baseline speed profile define the acceleration and decel-
eration phase, respectively. The cruising speed was set
so as to achieve a given average speed; see Sect. 6 below
for numerical values. An example of a baseline case is
given in Fig. 2 below.
5 Road data
Ten synthetic road profiles of 2 km length were gener-
ated corresponding to short urban bus routes. The gen-
erated bus routes were defined in such a way that their
slope variations were within ±1% for five routes (Route
group I) and within ±3% for the other five (Route group
II). There were four stops in total, at 0, 500, 1500, and
2000 m from the starting point; see also the top panel of
Fig. 1. The generated road profiles were similar to a bus
route in Kongsberg, Norway (considered within the
framework of the Sohjoa Baltic project) which is roughly
2 km long, with a total of 4 stops, and with small slope
variation. The road profiles were defined with one spline
for every 500 m, which is sufficient given the mild slope
variation.
6 Simulation results
In order to evaluate the performance of the speed profile
optimization method, two case studies have been
Fig. 2 An example of a baseline speed profile for an entire driving cycle (from start to end, and back again). In this case, the average speed
between stops was set to 10 km/h
Page 5 of 8
considered. For each of the road profiles, the desired
average speed was set either to 10 km/h or 15 km/h,
which are suitable values for cases where the distance
between the bus stops are rather short; Oskarbski et al.
[19]. The maximum speed was set to 40 km/h. More-
over, in all cases below, the vehicle’s battery initial state
of charge was set to 95% at the start of the trip and the
mass of the vehicle (when empty) was set to 2000 kg. In
order to form a baseline case against which the
optimization algorithm can be compared, the energy
consumption of the bus was computed using the method
described in Sect. 4.3 with same average speed, initial
battery state of charge, and mass. The performance is
typically measured either as the total energy saving (i.e.
E in Eq. (1); see also Dib et al. [12]), or the battery usage
savings (i.e. S in Eq. (4); see also Mensing et al. [9]).
Those two values differ slightly, due to the battery
round-trip efficiency coefficient; see Eq. (2). Here, both
measures will be given. In all cases (speed profile
optimization and the baseline case), the speed profiles
consisted of n = 40 splines so that each spline covered
50 m.
6.1 Case study I
In this case study, the optimization was carried out for a
single round trip, i.e. total of 4 km driving, for both of the
bus route groups. For the purpose of comparison, the
mass of the bus was fixed to the initial value (2000 kg)
both for the baseline case and for the speed profile
optimization.
The results obtained from the simulations (henceforth:
Case study I) are presented in Table 1 for each of the
bus route groups (Groups I and II). The second column
from the left shows the required average speed between
consecutive bus stops, and the two right-most columns
show the energy savings and the battery usage savings,
respectively. Both the energy savings and the battery
usage savings are calculated relative to the energy con-
sumption and battery usage of the vehicle when follow-
ing the speed profiles defined using the baseline method.
The results obtained from the simulations show that by
following the optimized speed profiles, the total energy
consumption of the vehicle is reduced by an average of
Torabi et al. European Transport Research Review (2020) 12:2 Page 6 of 8

Table 1 Simulation results obtained for Case study I. The second column from the left shows the average speed of the vehicle
between stops (set to either 10 or 15 km/h). The two right-most columns show the energy savings and battery usage savings
relative to the energy consumption and battery usage of the baseline case, respectively
Bus route Average speed (km/h) Energy savings (%) Battery usage savings (%)
Group I 10 12.62 ± 2.36 12.44 ± 2.69
15 10.19 ± 1.69 10.50 ± 1.57
Group II 10 9.50 ± 1.74 9.49 ± 1.95
15 7.40 ± 1.73 7.39 ± 1.95

around 11.5% and 8.5% for bus routes with slopes within
±1% (Group I) and ± 3% (Group II) respectively. More-
over, the battery usage of the vehicle is decreased by
similar values relative to the battery usage of the baseline
method.
The bottom panel of Fig. 1 shows an example of an
optimized speed profile for one of the routes in Group I,
in a case with 10 km/h average speed between stops.
Note that even though the speed profile gives an impres-
sion of high speed variability, exaggerated by the com-
pressed horizontal axis, it should be noted that the
(magnitude of the) maximum acceleration is never above
0.6 m/s2. Moreover, with 10 km/h average speed, the
travel over the first 500 m (i.e. between the start and the
first stop) takes 3 min, implying that the 3–4 mild accel-
eration and deceleration cycles in that interval should
not cause discomfort to the passengers. Similar observa-
tions can be made for the other intervals.
6.2 Case study II
An additional case study (Case study II) was considered as
well in which the vehicle continues its operation until the
battery state-of-charge drops below a certain threshold
(here 20%). In this experiment, which is an extension of
Case study I, the vehicle’s motion was simulated using both
the speed profile optimization method and the baseline
method. In order to emulate a typical bus driving scenario,
the mass of the vehicle was varied at each bus stop in the
following way
m ¼ m0 þ n  75 kg ð11Þ
where m0 is the initial mass (2000 kg) and n is the num-
ber of passengers chosen randomly from 0 to 6 (the
maximum number for the minibus considered here)
multiplied by the average weight of a passenger (here
considered to be 75 kg). In order to make a fair compari-
son, the mass variation at stops was identical for both
methods (SPO and baseline). The time spent at the bus
stops (which affects the total energy consumption) was
not included in the analysis, since it is the same for both
methods.
The optimization was carried out for both bus
routes (Groups I and II), stop-by-stop, generating
one speed profile for each segment (i.e. the stretch
of road between two stops) for every possible mass
value, and for each average speed value. As before,
the vehicle’s average speed was set either to 10 km/h
or 15 km/h between stops. At every stop during a
round trip, an optimized speed profile was selected
by considering the change in the vehicle’s mass and
the required average speed. The results obtained
from the simulations are presented in Table 2. The
results show that by using the SPO method, the
electric vehicle is able to increase the number of
completed round trips by around 12% relative to the
baseline method. Moreover, the energy and battery
usage savings when using SPO are similar to the
values obtained in Case study I.

Table 2 Simulation results obtained for Case study II. The second column from the left shows the average speed of the vehicle
between stops (set to either 10 or 15 km/h) whereas the third and the fourth columns give the average energy consumption of the
vehicle per round trip using the SPO method and the baseline method, respectively. The fifth and sixth columns from the left show
the number of completed round trips before the vehicle’s battery state-of-charge drops below 20%. The two right-most columns
show the average battery usage of the vehicle
Bus Average Average energy consumption per round trip Number of round trips before Average battery usage per round trip
route speed (kWh) discharge (%)
(km/h)
SPO baseline SPO baseline SPO baseline
Group I 10 1.013 ± 0.157 1.141 ± 0.186 37 ± 1 32 ± 1 2.03 ± 0.10 2.26 ± 0.03
15 1.015 ± 0.124 1.115 ± 0.167 42 ± 1 37 ± 1 2.01 ± 0.13 2.23 ± 0.19
Group II 10 1.074 ± 0.181 1.216 ± 0.193 36 ± 1 32 ± 1 2.08 ± 0.10 2.26 ± 0.04
15 1.120 ± 0.163 1.193 ± 0.183 43 ± 1 38 ± 1 2.18 ± 0.09 2.34 ± 0.03
Torabi et al. European Transport Research Review (2020) 12:2
7 Discussion
The results presented in Case study I show that the SPO
method improves the efficiency of an electric bus by re-
ducing the energy consumption of the vehicle by around
11.5% and 8.5% for bus routes with slope variation
within ±1% (Group I) and ± 3% (Group II), respectively,
in a single round trip. Moreover, as was shown in Case
study II, with the SPO method, the electric bus is able to
carry out around four more round trips, compared to
the baseline method introduced above, before the vehi-
cle’s battery needs recharging (when the state-of-charge
drops below a certain threshold).
The reported energy savings in Sect. 6.1 (Case study
I) are within the range commonly found in the litera-
ture. However, our results are not directly comparable
to those values since our baseline case is different, and
more stringent: Here, the results are compared to a
(quite energy-efficient) baseline case, involving au-
tonomous operation with PID control. In other works,
e.g. Dib et al. [12] the comparison is made with a
(largely unspecified) human driving cycle, which in all
likelihood would not be as energy-efficient as our
baseline case, with its PID control, see e.g. Mersky and
Samaras [20] and Pourabdollah et al. [18]. Further-
more, as was shown in Torabi and Wahde [2], for ve-
hicles with combustion engines, the SPO method
outperforms DP-based methods when both method
types are applied to the same situation with identical
baseline cases.
Unlike DP-based methods (and MPC methods in par-
ticular), the SPO method does not require online itera-
tive calculations. Once a speed profile has been
generated for a given road profile, it can be used without
any further modifications (assuming that the vehicle is
able to follow the profile; see the next paragraph). More-
over, the SPO based method can be used in cases where
longer optimization horizons must be considered (10 km
for example) with larger speed range for the vehicle
(highway driving, for instance), situations that would re-
quire heavy computations, and long running times, if
DP-based methods were to be used.
Here it has been assumed that the vehicle is able to
follow the speed profile without any interference from
the surrounding traffic. This is a valid assumption for an
increasing number of urban bus routes for which dedi-
cated lanes are being built in city centers. Another as-
sumption made here is that the motion of the vehicle is
not interrupted by any traffic lights. However, the results
can be generalized to routes involving traffic lights: For a
given bus route, with known traffic light positions, a set
of speed profiles can be generated to handle the binary
case of traffic lights being either green or red. With n
traffic lights between two stops, one could thus optimize
2n speed profiles (noting again that the optimization can
Page 7 of 8
be done a priori, before driving), covering all possible
traffic light states, and then let the vehicle switch dy-
namically between profiles during driving, depending on
the encountered situations. Even though the number of
speed profiles grows rapidly with n, it should be no
problem to handle realistic values of n, especially for the
short bus routes considered here. A more difficult prob-
lem, which has not been explicitly modeled here, is the
case in which the bus has to slow down or even stop
due to unpredictable events (e.g. pedestrians crossing
the road). In such cases, which can perhaps largely be
avoided by careful city planning, one could simply revert
to following the speed profile once the obstacle is gone,
thus again accelerating to reach the cruising speed. Any
such event would negatively impact the energy savings
(regardless of the method used) but would be necessary
since safety is a more important consideration.
Moreover, in Case study II, it was assumed that the ve-
hicle’s mass is known, including the weight of the pas-
sengers, which can increase the total weight by up to
40–50% for a bus. This can for example be achieved by
combining statistical data on the typical passenger
weight with onboard sensors measuring the number of
passengers entering or exiting (or even a camera-based
system). A bank of speed profiles can then be generated
for a set of different total masses, and the vehicle can
then switch between profiles (much as in the traffic-light
case considered above), depending on its current esti-
mated mass. Alternatively, the speed profile (for a given
mass) could be generated remotely, on demand, and
then uploaded to the bus before it leaves the stop. Gen-
erating a speed profile for a 500 m stretch between two
stops typically takes a few minutes on a standard desk-
top computer, a time interval that could be reduced to
seconds using a faster, cloud-based computer resource
noting also that the genetic algorithm is almost com-
pletely parallelizable.
As for the length of the acceleration (and deceleration)
phases (i.e. the first and last spline; see Sect. 4.3) in a
speed profile, several different values were tested before
settling on a value of 50 m, which provided the best (i.e.
most challenging) results for the baseline case against
which our results are compared. With smaller values,
the acceleration would be too high, thus resulting in ex-
cessive energy usage, and with larger values the cruising
phase would be very short, again leading to increased
energy usage (as well as a risk that the top speed would
have to exceed the allowed maximum speed).
The average speed was chosen to be either 10 or 15
km/h in order for the autonomous bus to comply with
the regulations imposed in this project. However, even
without those regulations, at least the higher of those
speeds is a realistic average speed for a bus operating in
an urban environment [19]. Nevertheless, the average
Torabi et al. European Transport Research Review (2020) 12:2
speed can be set to higher values as well, in order to fol-
low a specific timetable. With a different average speed
setting, one would then have to rerun the simulations to
calculate the energy savings.
A possible extension of this work would be to adapt
the fitness measure (in the optimization) so that it in-
creases the emphasis on regenerative braking, thus
resulting in larger energy savings, but possibly at the ex-
pense of slightly larger acceleration and deceleration.
Another topic for future work would be to migrate the
optimization procedure to a cloud-based server, as well
as running tests in real minibuses using the infrastruc-
ture and vehicles available in the Sohjoa Baltic project.
8 Conclusion
For an autonomous electric bus with regenerative brak-
ing operating in an urban environment, the proposed
method provides energy savings of around 7 to 12% rela-
tive to a baseline case with a constant reference speed
between stops. The savings translate to an increase of
around 10% in the number of round trips that can be ex-
ecuted on a single battery charge, corresponding roughly
to an extra hour of operation for the case considered
here. The results also demonstrate the applicability of
the SPO method, originally developed for vehicles with
combustion engines, to electric vehicles.
Acknowledgements
The funding support of the EU Baltic Sea Interreg program through the
Sohjoa Baltic project (grant number R073) is gratefully acknowledged.
Declarations
The data used during the current study are available from the corresponding
author upon request.
Authors’ contributions
All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Funding
Open access funding provided by Chalmers University of Technology.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Received: 3 July 2019 Accepted: 17 December 2019
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